LitRes book downloader

Workflow

Do you want to download a book from litres.com/ru, but it doesn't have such an feature? There is a solution to. This repo has two kinds of scripts: the first downloads raw book material - pages as images, the second is dedicated to convert the raw material to one of formats: PDF, TIFF - for a single file, and other formats.

Script get_images.py is of the first kind, it downloads the raw material with Selenium and it can raise error (see ChromeDriver issue). Scripts of the second kind are two there:

• create_pdf_by_fpdf2.py (alive successor of fpdf, learn more: https://py-pdf.github.io/fpdf2/History.html)
• create_pdf_by_pillow.py (fork of PIL) The first one only converts the book to PDF, the second can convert to PDF, and image formats: AVIF, BMP, GIF, PDF, TIFF, JPEG, PNG, and more (see https://pillow.readthedocs.io/en/stable/handbook/image-file-formats.html)

The repo has also config.py. You need to set up it, namely:

• fill up your LOGIN and PASSWORD of your LitRes account
• put your BOOK_ID (to know, go to the book webpage, open the LitRes reader, its page will have an URL like https://litres.com/static/or3/view/or.html?art_type=4&file=00000000, you need a value of the file parameter, it's the book ID)
• put the book PAGES (to know, open the book with the LitRes reader, run DevTools (Ctrl+Shift+I, usually), pick the last page by the element selector/picker (Ctrl+Shift+C), in the Elements tab, you will find an img element which has the parent div, it has an id attribute like id="p_X", a number X + 1 is PAGES)

After that:

• run get_images.py to download the raw material
• run create_pdf_by_X.py (fpdf2 or pillow) to get a PDF or another format of the book

That's done!

ChromeDriver issue

(The following solution is for GNU/Linux)

If you get an error like selenium.common.exceptions.SessionNotCreatedException: Message: session not created: This version of ChromeDriver only supports Chrome version 114 Current browser version is... when get_images.py is running, try:

1. Check your Chrome/Chromium version
2. Go to https://googlechromelabs.github.io/chrome-for-testing/ or to https://googlechromelabs.github.io/chrome-for-testing/known-good-versions-with-downloads.json
3. Download a necessary version of ChromeDriver (not Chrome)
4. Unzip the archive
5. Find your ChromeDriver executable folder (something like /usr/bin/chromedriver-linux64)
6. Move/copy the downloaded ChromeDriver to that folder, i.e. replace the existing one
7. Try to run get_images.py again